Not far today, just a four hour 180 mile run, which at first was quite busy along Ruta 40, taking us away from the lovely town of San Carlos de Bariloche along to the next busy town of El Bolson.

El Bolson looked set up for all kinds of winter and summer sports, and was absolutely heaving with traffic, with the usual queues for petrol and money from the cash machines.  

The ride was a stunning continuation from the other day through the lakes, and snow topped mountain sides, before it took us out into the pampas lands again.  I have a feeling that from here onwards we will be alone a lot more, which is a very pleasurable way to ride.  Tomorrow we turn east from Ruta 40, to cut across the country to the east coast, before our descent to Ushuaia begins.  Hotels are more sparse, so we may have a few longer days, but we’ll still try to take our time.

It was a real pleasure to catch up with Troy yesterday.  We’re so lucky to have met such lovely people on our trip, so many of whom we are still in contact with, one way or the other.  We have plenty of nice people to come back and visit in the future.

We find ourselves tonight in a busy coach hotel, where the majority of guests are tourists.  It’s noisy, shabby and not a lot of fun, with a constant stream of coaches dropping off outside the door downstairs, and leaving their engines running for half an hour at a time.  Just when we think we’ve adjusted to the constant noise of a country, we suddenly find ourselves saying ‘oh my goodness, it’s unbelieveable, so loud!’.  

Last night we waited with Troy at the hotel for his friend to arrive, who was driving for 5 hours from Chile.  They were planning to head off into the hills hiking today.  As we waited, it was getting up towards 11pm.  Of course, we thinking about heading in to bed, whilst all the Argentinians were heading out to get their dinner!  I’m not sure we’d ever quite adjust to that custom.  We’d been down and had ours at 7.30pm, that seemed quite late enough.  Tonight we’ve treated ourselves to a supermarket picnic of salami and cheese, we’re pretty contented with that.

We waved goodbye to El Capitan, (an extremely large great dane type dog) and his owner, Alberto this morning.  El Capitan was fantastic, he was a superb guard dog, barking whenever anyone came near his territory and therefore alerting Alberto when you needed attention, but also an absolute softy for wanting a stroke, or a lie down at your feet.

Junin had been very enjoyable to rest and revive ourselves in, with a great little town plaza surrounded with places to eat and drink, and people watch.  We also visited the beautiful river yesterday, and just sat for a while.

Today took us through some really busy tourist towns on the way to Bariloche.  This is obviously where the Argentinians holiday, either in summer, or winter when they can ski.  There are endless lakes along this route, and the scenery reminded us of Canada, Norway and at times Switzerland. Once again we saw queues beyond imagining lining up for petrol, and the banks!  It really is astounding, to us.  In one petrol queue, there must have been 50 cars and bikes waiting.

The rest of the ride into town was great, and when we arrived at the hotel our good friend Troy was there to greet us.  Troy is one half of the Alaskan team of Troy and Tracy.  Tracy is currently off visiting the Galapagos Isles and Machu Picchu with his wife Mary Lee, so Troy is travelling alone for three weeks.  You can read more of their adventures on http://crossingtheamericas.com/  

The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent idling away the time in the most enjoyable way of chatting and eating.

So we had checked again, was today’s route really going to be free of the dreaded Ripio? Hmm…. the websites said so, the two or three people we had asked said so.  This was to be our sixth day riding in a row, it looked ok, 250 miles with an estimated travel time of 5 hours, let’s just bite the bullet and see.

It always seems that when we don’t need to be ready, we are up early and champing at the bit to go.  The laid back guy at the apartments had asked us what time we wanted breakfast, and we had told him 8, as we’d like to be away by 8.30 am.  Perhaps we should have realised that might be a South American 8? We were all packed and ready for the off when he arrived with breakfast about 8.20.  

Oh yes, breakfast here consists of bread rolls, maybe croissants, jam, butter and tea or coffee.  Sometimes with the added bonus of mystery meat, sometimes a slice of cheese.  As the Argentinians don’t begin eating their dinner until 10pm, I guess that they might not be that hungry first thing?

I can’t actually eat bread, or anything with flour, but luckily in one of the first places we stayed in Argentina, the lovely hostess was also a Coeliac, and showed me the symbol to look out for on products to show they are gluten free.  I’ve had no problem in finding these products, and am rather enjoying the sweet ‘bizcochos’ for breakfast.

Anyway, back to today, we were ready to leave by 9 am, not so bad.  We rode away, and were soon into the rhythm of the day, weeping up and down the rise and fall of the roads taking across more pampas and through mountain lined roads.  The going was very enjoyable, the temperature perfect, ok, so there was quite a strong wind still, but nothing uncomfortable.

On our way to Junin we passed through a few towns on Ruta 40, Las Lajas and Zapala, but mainly there was nothing again, just vast expanses of space, a few horses, goats sheep and cows, blue skies and scenery.  At one point when we turned a corner, there was a single solitary pointed mountain with its peak covered in snow rising up majestically like a toblerone bar.

We rolled into Junin around 3.30 pm, and received a warm greeting at the apartment which will be home for 3 nights, from our host and his massive dog ‘El Capitan’.  This’ll do nicely, thank you.

Ripio, ripio, ripio was the main item in our day today!

As we left the apartment this morning, the owners told us that in about 100 km there was roadworks meaning about 20km of Ripio on Ruta 40 and we should take ‘much care’.

That prediction was somewhat correct, and somewhat incorrect.  The roadworks began about 70km into the journey, where Ruta 40 just disappeared, and we were taken onto diversion after diversion of gravel, mud or sand interspersed with a tiny section of tarmac.  

This section lasted for 40 km and took about an hour and a half to ride.  Then there was a section of false hope, lovely black tarmac that I must admit did look a bit raggedy around the edges. This was about 20km, before we were plunged back onto the horror of another 50km of full on Ripio, corrugated road surfaces that shook us about all over the place.

In this area, where one region joined onto another we were travelling through beautiful lakes surrounded by mountains, but essentially what looked like pretty inhospitable lands, so there were no houses, no villages, no places to stop for a rest, just us, a few other vehicles, and heaps of dust.

We made four stops throughout this ride to check on bolts, spokes, tyres and anything we could think of to make sure they were holding up to the strain of being shaken so much.

As we drew toward the Nequen region of Patagonia from the Cuyo region above,  a vision appeared before us; beautiful blacktop, with proper edges and yellow lines down the middle. We wanted to get off and kiss it!  Fabulous.  This carried us the rest of our way, with a head wind to add to our fun, to our destination, Chos Malal (sounds Indian?).

In Chos Malal we headed straight for petrol, where there was a queue of 10 or so cars before us.  It’s hard to imagine living out here, the landscape and surround is still harsh, hot and very windy, where you have to wait until things arrive, you don’t just have everything there, when you want it.

As ever, the people are extremely friendly, we had a very warm greeting in the supermarket, and at tonight’s apartment.

We are now in Patagonia, the region of Argentina that contains the furthest point South in the world that you can visit by road, Ushuaia, our destination. 1,700 miles from where we are right now.

Heading off this morning, we had 350 (217 miles) km to ride, and Google Maps had a predicted time of 4 hours.

Paul had previously researched the route following Ruta 40, as I previously mentioned, to look for any areas that weren’t tarmacked.  We knew today’s route was to take us on a detour around a part of unpaved Ruta 40.

We had had a discussion yesterday about what roads we were going on, and it seemed to make sense, although Paul did say, I thought we were to go on the RN143 as well as RN144.

Hmm, all went swimmingly well: we had followed the road from the city of Mendoza, on some dual carriageway, and then down to single.  Ruta 40 was fairly busy, but ok.  Then came our turn off to head for RN144, it was wonderful, 26 blissful miles of riding alone, with the snow topped mountains for company. That was until we reached the barrels cordoning off the road, saying ‘road in construction, no entry!’.  We are beginning to understand that when an Argentinian map says there is a road, that’s because they hope one might be there at some point in the future!

We started onto a gravel track by the side of the tarmac, signposted Malargue, our destination, but soon decided that with 76km to ride to the turning, it was going to take an awfully long time. Perhaps 3 hours.  Alternatively we could return the 26 miles, and take the longer route via RN143/RN144.  This we did, the RN143 was a never ending road, that seemed to be heading away from our destination.  However, we reached our point to turn for the RN144, and found a quick place for a bite to eat.  

The woman in the shop told Paul it was the correct way, even though the tiny road we were on at this point seemed like it would head nowhere.  We set off following the instructions……..  It didn’t head nowhere, no, it took us on a gravel road through the town’s rubbish dump!  I could also see a river coming on the map, and I imagined a bridge- I was wrong, we were soon doing a river crossing, which was well judged enough by Paul to make sure I didn’t have to get out and push in the water.  This was followed up by a quick sideways skid across the mud on the other side, and whoop, whoop, before we knew it we were onto the RN144.  We looked at each other in amazement.

The RN144 was a much nicer road, and took us up over some small hills, where people were pick-nicking in the shade of willow trees at the side of the road.  There were fresh snowy mountain views, and even some spectacular salt flats to enjoy.

We made a few more stops to pace ourselves, and finally arrived at our stop 8 hours after we began. We made a supermarket dash for dinner, and are now looking forward to a good rest tonight.